Diary

Sunday, November 27, 2016

The Empathy Machine

Last week I experienced an empathy machine. The Machine To Be Another uses virtual reality techniques to enable you to begin to see the world through another person's eyes.

At FLUPP, the literary festival that was this year in the City Of God, we were invited to experience the world through the eyes of the parents of young black men who had been murdered by the police.

When I put on the head set listening to a mother's voice in my head; and when I looked down I saw her legs instead of mine. Her hands instead of mine.

So when she held the photograph of her dead son, i held it too.

He was such a gifted child, I heard myself saying, he loved life and he loved his family.

Ho loved football.

And I hand back the photograph to the young woman who is in the room with me and, as she hands me a football, a performer in the 'real' room with me hands me a football and I find myself holding it.

Football was his passion, football was his life. And i find myself in another room in front of a display cabinet of all the trophies he had won.

And for his birthday he loved chocolate cake.

And now I'm holding a piece of the cake, and I'm eating it, and it feels sticky and it tastes sweet.

And if I understand her correctly, she was sure he wasn't involved in drugs, he loved football too much....

And I find myself standing in one of the alleyways of the favela, looking at a memorial to him and to his friends, all killed on the same day.

But even if he was, even if he was involved in drugs, he had the right to be tried, we all have that right, and the police had no right to kill him.

And then it was over, and someone took the ead set off, and there i was, blinking a little in disbelief, back in the tent of the City Of God schoolyard, and smiling at the kind faces of the performer and technician who had been there with me.

The sound track was created from interviews with the mother concerned, using her voice, and the images were filmed in her own home.

It's a remarkable and beautiful idea, developed by an idealistic group dedicated to using technology to develop human empathy on a world wide scale.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

trying to keep the light shining

There was a police raid on the favela last Saturday which led to a firefight.

Later that morning, a police helicopter crashed nearby, killing all the crew.

Following that, police intensified what are euphemistically known as their ‘operations’.

As a result of that, young men started to disappear from their homes on Saturday night.

And then on Sunday morning, distraught families searching the overgrown areas of wasteland in and around the community recovered the bodies of 7 young men, some bearing signs of torture, which they placed in the town square.

Following that, the Police sealed off all access to the favela, preventing people going to and from their work.

Following that, the local clinic closed, depriving people of crucial medical care.

And following that, the police announced that their ‘operation’ would continue indefinitely.

Only the week before, I had been a judge at the World Slam competition, and the Brazilian poet won, and the whole amazing and unique Book Festival that is FLUPP closed with music and dancing and with joy and hope and celebration.

And the day before that, I’d been performing QUEEN JESUS there.

But the hope and the possibility for a better world that all that represented…. feels as if it has been snuffed out.

So I’m left, like so many of us, feeling helpless.

Asking myself what is the point of putting on a white dress and climbing up onto a stage and pretending to be Queen Jesus.

It does feel a little as if it's a waste of time.

But then it’s not as if this blatant cruelty and injustice has just been invented.

It’s not as if it’s a new thing for our economic and political structures to be breaking down; or for those who benefit from them to be resorting to brute force to defend their interests.

We began to see all this coming way back in 1968.

This madness, this violence, this self-destructive folly and injustice has been present all my life.

It’s just that the self-protective bubble I used to protect myself has burst; and now, with wide open eyes, I have to look out at the state of the world.

And my fear, my anger and my disgust will not make it go away.

So if I ask myself what I should do the answer is actually still the same.

However ridiculous or futile or absurd it seems, I have to go on speaking the truth as I see it.

Trump and the Brexiters may go on deluding themselves with their talk of walls but no matter what they say or what they do they cannot stop the change that is coming.

They and we have no choice but to acknowledge that we all belong to the one world and we are all in this together.

And we have to act on this knowledge.

So it’s important to dedicate the work to those young men who died so horribly in the wasteland, and also, hard as it is, to those military policemen who died in the helicopter.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Gentileza or kindness.

We were travelling through an endless dreary underpass in the port area of Rio de Janeiro.

It was the usual hellish, frightening and repulsive kind of place where you often see the makeshift encampments of the homeless.

But even they seemed to have been cleared away, and there was no human presence to relieve the dismal monotony.

Until I began to notice the panels.

There they were, in their remarkable lettering, painted on each of the pillars of the flyover.

Impossible to read what they said, as our taxi sped past, trying to escape this accursed place as quickly as possible, but one word kept standing out:

GENTILEZA.

And a sentence:

GENTILEZA GERA GENTILEZA.

Kindness. From Kindness comes kindness.

And it was such a strange message to find in such harsh surroundings.

Apparently they were painted by a man who lived on the streets who came to be known as O Profeta Gentileza. A tall emaciated man with a long white beard who wore a white robe and who, when he wasn’t painting the fifty six pillars of the flyover, walked the streets all over the city carrying his message on a placard in one hand and flowers in the other.

There’s something very inspiring and something very futile and sad about this man painting his thoughts over flyover pillars where they could never be read.

And after his death in 1996, with his artworks becoming increasingly damaged and vandalised, the town council decided to cover them in grey paint.

And so it looked as if they were gone.

But that wasn't the end of the story: they were missed, their absence was mourned, and after a massive public campaign the murals were restored.

And here they still are, in all their eccentric glory.

And a cynic might say that the traffic still roars by regardless.

When I despair about the future of theatre and its intractable problems as a labour intensive craft in a capital intensive economy, I feel my attempts to create beauty in this form are really futile.

About as futile as writing messages on a flyover.

But even as the cars race by, fleeing one appalling traffic jam and on their way to the next, at least a precarious trace of the prophet's vision remains.

A fragile hope and belief that things can be different.

I’ll remember this man with gratitude. But I won’t start painting messages of peace and love on motorways.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Sacred theatre in a private space

What is happening in the world is a nightmare.

It’s no consolation that I saw it coming. I remember writing when I set up my website some time in the nineties that our democratic institutions were plainly inadequate for the massive changes confronting the world.

The UK votes for Brexit; the US votes for Trump. As Noam Chomsky says, it is extraordinary that we should choose so clearly to accelerate our self destruction.

All I can do in the face of all this is keep making theatre.

Creating it every way I can.

On November 6th I was invited to perform JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN in a private house.

I said yes because I wanted to experiment. I wanted to see if it was possible to turn up at an unknown space late in the afternoon, arrive with empty hands, and perform the show to an audience that night.

It was a theatre producer who invited me to do it in his wife’s family’s house.

An old house, by Sao Paulo standards, I’d guess dating from the 1920’s, built by a Lebanese immigrant to Brazil who wanted somewhere big enough to bring his family over.

In the last few years it’s fallen into disuse, and my friend is slowly beginning to reclaim it.

I’d asked him to provide bread and wine and candles; suggested a fee which he undertook to collect from his guests. Which he did; and before I left for my hotel gave me at least double in notes in an old cardboard box.

The room I was to perform in was big enough to seat 27 people crammed together and with just enough space for a small table to serve as an altar, two wooden boxes to put candles on, and a desk lamp in each corner.

It was lit by two old desk lamps, which I found somewhere, the rather gorgeous light fitting in the centre of the room, and the candles which I’d asked my friend to supply.

I poured the wine into plastic shot glasses which I placed on a tray, found a white table cloth for the altar, and used my rainbow scarf to wrap the bread in.

It couldn’t have been simpler. And it worked.

I won’t forget those 27 faces lit by candlelight, all focussed so intently on trying to understand a foreign language, some with tears rolling down their cheeks…

This was sacred theatre.

And it strengthens me, somehow, to know it can be done. That it can work artistically and economically.

Because, faced with the hatred that surrounds us, a theatre based on compassion and empathy may be the most effective weapon that we have.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Queen Jesus in Belfast and the City of God

Renata Carvalho is a force of nature in THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN.

She is subversive, revolutionary - and also theologically orthodox.

Her name means ‘born again’. Which is exactly how she is: having left her male identity behind, she has been reborn in her true self.

Just like so many of us. Just like me…

And Jesus tells us we must all do that: that we must be reborn again to enter the Queendom of Heaven.

The church teaches us that when God came down to earth She did not take the form of the powerful or the priestly or the rich, but instead the form of the oppressed and the poor.

And so now it would make absolute sense for her to take the form of a travesti - for so long considered the dregs of Brazilian society, associated with prostitution, drug taking and early death.

A group of people still denied access to education, health care, housing, gainful employment, and even to their own names.

Which is why Renata had to travel to Belfast under her male name…

She brings to the part all the anguish and rage associated with her identity; but also the courage, the energy, and the ferocious wit all incarnate in the fascinating, powerful, authoritative, charismatic and extraordinarily beautiful being that she is on stage.

It’s a total joy to watch her; partly because her interpretation is so radically different from mine in so many ways, and yet is also so rigorously faithful both to the text and the essential spirit of the play.

And I’m so happy with the incredible success the play has enjoyed in Londrina and Sao Paulo - every performance sold out, a waiting list of people waiting for returns, unanimous and high profile critical acclaim.

Not to mention the interviews and the profiles in websites and the straight press. I think this may be the first time a travesti has received such due recognition as a serious and accomplished theatre artist.

And this is having an effect on the fierce and ongoing debate about trans rights in Brazil.

Yesterday I was talking to a gifted and beautiful young travesti who was telling me, with tears in her eyes, of how much the play means to her and her sisters. Of how it has given them encouragement and hope.

And that’s the thing that makes me proudest of all.

Tomorrow and Saturday Renata performs the play in the Outburst Arts Festival.

This is a remarkable institution: a book festival that takes place in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. This year it is happening in the favela of the Cidade de Deus. The City of God…

I am collaborating with Uma SóVoz (with one voice), a choir whose members are all homeless or live in dire poverty. Together we are going to use parts of the text and their song to create new liturgy of defiance and of hope.

Thursday, November 03, 2016

White Ted, two travestis, and The Gospel According to Jesus Queen Of Heaven in Sao Paulo

White Ted came into my life soon after my partner died.

I was visiting my daughter and she said, “Dad, you need White Ted”.

And i said: “But what about you?”

And she said “I’ve got Theodora”.

And she had her lovely man too who was even better than her big brown teddy bear and so I took White Ted home with me, feeling all the more touched because I had never in my life had a teddy Bear.

My father didn’t want to me to have one, I think because he knew he had so badly wanted to have a girl and so was all the more determined I grew up a man.

And Teddy Bears were too soft for boys.

My upbringing bore a remarkable resemblance to what is now known as “reparative therapy” - a means of supposedly “curing” young trans children and making them grow up in the biological gender to which they were assigned at birth.

The most important aspect of this particularly horrible form of abuse consists in making sure its victim is kept strictly isolated from everything that could be remotely considered ‘girlish” and raised in surroundings that are rigidly masculine.

A teddy bear was apparently not masculine enough; which was why when I eventually met him in my mid fifties White Ted filled a need I didn’t even know was there.

And he’s with me here in Sao Paulo because he goes with me everywhere.

And among many other things he’s a kind of symbol of my gender non-conformity, which makes his presence here very important with me as I have come to see my play “The Gospel According To jesus Queen Of Heaven” performed in Portuguese by Renata Carvalho.

One of the many things I love about Renata is that she so publicly identifies as ‘travesti’.

Years ago, when Susie was dying of the brain tumour, i remember speaking at a Playwrights’ conference and when asked to identify myself said

“I”m not a male writer and I’m not a female writer. I’m a transgendered writer”.

And looking back I can see so clearly how somehow my state of exhaustion and grief opened me up to a profound truth about myself.

I had to use the word “transgendered’ because there was no other.

But it doesn’t truly express who I am, because I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a state of transition from ‘male’ to ‘female’.

Some of us can see very clearly that our original ‘maleness’ was terrible mistake, and that we always were truly ‘female’.

But I could never do that. I just knew I was not a man.

But then who was I? I never really knew.

I accepted the label “transgender” because when I was young there were absolutely no names for someone like myself. No names at all.

I was somehow unspeakable.

And ,believe me, almost any word is better than none.

So I’ve made do with it.

But what a joy, somehow, to come across an interview Renata gave last week when she, too, said